Dark Reading have an article on distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks and says there is one underway somewhere on the Internet at any time of the day. “When DDOSes do occur, they are done with much greater purpose than they used to be,” says Rodney Joffe, senior vice president and senior technologist for Neustar. “They are usually to obscure what’s [really] happening in the background.”Noting ISPs consider DDOS attacks as one of their biggest threats, they say most attacks are waged by botnets, “some as large as tens of thousands of bot machines, according to a recent survey of ISPs by Arbor Networks. Arbor found an average of 1,200 DDOS attacks each day across 38 ISP networks. On 220 of the last 365 days, there has been at least one DDOS attack of one million packets per second, says Danny McPherson, chief research officer for Arbor Networks.”Dark Reading says, “There are three main stages of mitigating a DDOS attack. The key is for ISPs to stop the damage, while at the same time carefully peeling back the layers of the attack to be sure they actually get to the root of it.” They then go on to outline the stages, these being the first five minutes, the first hour and the investigation – what should be done to counter and how to go about it.The full article is available in Dark Reading at www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=135457